Drug traffickers are hacking US surveillance drones to get past border patrol

The US Department of Homeland Security has turned to using small
drones to monitor its borders, but drug traffickers have
apparently already found a way to avoid surveillance.

Timothy Bennett, a Department of Homeland Security program
manager, said last week that drug smugglers are using technology
to spoof and jam unmanned aircraft systems that are being used at
the border.

“The bad guys on the border have lots of money. And what they are
putting money into is spoofing and jamming of GPSs, so we are
doing funding to look at small UAS that we can counter this,”
Bennett said during a panel at the Center for Strategic & International
Studies.

Spoofing is when someone is able to counterfeit the GPS signal
navigating the drone. Because non-military GPS signals are not
encrypted, they are vulnerable to being spoofed.

In a border patrol scenario, this means that the GPS signal from
the control station could be hijacked by the “spoofer” and
crashed.

Jamming is when someone uses a device to jam the GPS signal so
that the drone loses its ability to determine its location or
altitude.

Bennett said the DHS is currently investing in research to
improve the security of the unmanned systems so that they aren’t
vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

Tech Insider reached out to the Department of Homeland Security
to get more information on how often its drones were being
targeted and will update when we hear back.

But Bennett did tell Defense One that the spoofing
and jamming attacks were making it difficult for law enforcement
abilities to map drug routes.

“You’re out there looking, trying
to find out this path [they’re] going through with drugs, and we
can’t get good coordinate systems on it because we’re getting
spoofed. That screws up the whole thing. We got to fix that
problem,” Bennett told Defense One.